Testimony on Unemployment by Oscar Ameringer

Testimony on Unemployment (1932) Oscar Ameringer Introduction Oscar Ameringer migrated from Germany to Cincinnati, Ohio when he was fifteen years old. He arrived in 1885, one year before the Haymarket Riot in Chicago1. He joined the Knights of Labor the same year. In 1903, he moved to Columbus, Ohio and started working for the union newspaper, “Labor World”. He travelled around the country reporting on labor disputes and unfair working conditions. In 1932, the same year Meridel Le Sueur published “Women on the Breadlines,” Congress called Ameringer to testify on the condition of farmers around the country. Part of his testimony before Congress is below2. Primary Source During the last three months I have visited, as I have said, some twenty states of this wonderfully rich and beautiful country. Here are some of the things I heard and saw: In the state of Washington, I was told that the forest fires raging in that region all summer and fall were caused by unemployed timber workers and bankrupt farmers in an endeavor to earn a few honest dollars as firefighters. The last thing I saw on the night I left Seattle was numbers of women searching for scraps of food in the refuse piles of the principal market of that city. A number of Montana citizens told me of thousands of bushels of wheat left in the fields uncut on account of its low price that hardly paid for the harvesting. In Oregon I saw thousands of bushels of apples rotting in the orchards. Only absolutely flawless apples were still salable, at from 40 to 50 cents a box containing 200 apples. At the same time, there are millions of children who, on account of the poverty of their parents, will not eat one apple this winter. While I was in Oregon, the Portland Oregonian, bemoaned the fact that thousands of ewes3 were killed by the sheep raisers because they did not bring enough in the market to pay the freight on them. And while Oregon sheep raisers fed mutton4 to the buzzards, I saw men picking for meat scraps in the garbage cans in the cities of New York and Chicago. I talked to one man in a 1 Of course, you remember the Haymarket Riot of 1886. A clash between striking workers at the McCormick factory and Chicago police resulted in the death of several strikers. A rally in support of the striking workers on May 4 also turned violent. In the end, 8 men were arrested, most immigrants, and four were executed for the riot 2 Oscar Ameringer, Testimony before Congress, 1932 is in the public domain. 3 Female sheep. 4 Sheep flesh, used as food. 1 restaurant in Chicago. He told me of his experience in raising sheep. He said that he had killed 3,000 sheep this fall and thrown them down the canyon, because it cost $1.10 to ship a sheep, and then he would get less than a dollar for it. He said he could not afford to feed the sheep, and he would not let them starve, so he just cut their throats and threw them down the canyon. The roads of the West and Southwest teem with hungry hitchhikers. The camp fires of the homeless are seen along every railroad track. I saw men, women, and children walking over the hard roads. Most of them were tenant farmers who had lost their all in the late slump in wheat and cotton. Between Clarksville and Russellville, Ark., I picked up a family. The woman was hugging a dead chicken under a ragged coat. When I asked her where she had procured the fowl, first she told me she had found it dead in the road, and then added in grim humor, “They promised me a chicken in the pot, and now I got mine.1” In Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana I saw untold bales of cotton rotting in the fields because the cotton pickers could not keep body and soul together on 35 cents paid for picking 100 pounds.... As a result of this appalling overproduction on the one side and the staggering underconsumption on the other side, 70 per cent of the farmers of Oklahoma were unable to pay the interests on their mortgages. Last week one of the largest and oldest mortgage companies in that state went into the hands of the receiver. In that and other states we have now the interesting spectacle of farmers losing their farms by foreclosure and mortgage companies losing their recouped holdings by tax sales. The farmers are being pauperized by the poverty of industrial populations, and the industrial populations are being pauperized by the poverty of the farmers. Neither has the money to buy the product of the other, hence we have overproduction and underconsumption at the same time and in the same country. I have not come here to stir you in a recital of the necessity for relief for our suffering fellow citizens. However, unless something is done for them and done soon, you will have a revolution on hand. And when that revolution comes it will not come from Moscow, it will not be made by the poor Communists whom our police are heading up regularly and efficiently. When the revolution comes it will bear the label “Laid in the U. S. A.” and its chief promoters will be the people of American stock.... Some time ago a cowman came into my office in Oklahoma City. He was one of these double- fisted gentlemen, with the gallon hat and all. He said, “You do not know me from Adam’s ox.” I said, “No; I do not believe I know you.” He said, “I came to this country without a cent, but, knowing my onions, and by tending strictly to business, I finally accumulated two sections of land and a fine herd of white-faced Hereford cattle. I was independent.” 1 Herbert Hoover’s 1928 campaign slogan was “a chicken in every pot.” 2 I remarked that anybody could do that if he worked hard and did not gamble and used good management. He said, “After the war, cattle began to drop, and I was feeding them corn, and by the time I got them to Chicago the price of cattle, considering the price of corn I had fed them, was not enough to even pay my expenses. I could not pay anything.” Continuing, he said, “I mortgaged my two sections of land, and to-day I am cleaned out; by God, I am not going to stand for it.” I asked him what he was going to do about it, and he said, “We have got to have a revolution here like they had in Russia and clean them up.” I finally asked him, “Who is going to make the revolution?” He said, “I just want to tell you I am going to be one of them, and I am going to do my share in it.” I asked what his share was and he said, “I will capture a certain fort. I know I can get in with twenty of my boys,” meaning his cowboys, “because I know the inside and outside of it, and I [will] capture that with my men.” I rejoined, “Then what?” He said, “We will have 400 machine guns, so many batteries of artillery, tractors, and munitions and rifles, and everything else needed to supply a pretty good army.” Then I asked, “What then?” He said, “If there are enough fellows with guts in this country to do like us, we will march eastward and we will cut the East off. We will cut the East off from the West. We have got the granaries; we have the hogs, the cattle, the corn; the East has nothing but mortgages on our places. We will show them what we can do.” That man may be very foolish, and I think he is, but he is in dead earnest; he is a hard-shelled Baptist and a hard-shelled Democrat, not a Socialist or a Communist, but just a plain American cattleman whose ancestors went from Carolina to Tennessee, then to Arkansas, and then to Oklahoma. I have heard much of this talk from serious-minded prosperous men of other days. As you know, talk is always a mental preparation for action. Nothing is done until people talk and talk and talk it, and they finally get the notion that they will do it. I do not say we are going to have a revolution on hand within the next year or two, perhaps never. I hope we may not have such; but the danger is here. That is the feeling of our people—as reflected in the letters I have read. I have met these people virtually every day all over the country. There is a feeling among the masses generally that something is radically wrong. They are despairing of political action. They say the only thing you do in Washington is to take money from the pockets of the poor and put it into the pockets of the rich. They say that this Government is a conspiracy against the common people to enrich the already rich. I hear such remarks every day. I never pass a hitchhiker without inviting him in and talking to him. Bankers even are talking about that. They are talking in irrational tones. You have more Bolshevism among the bankers to-day than the hod carriers, I think. It is a terrible situation, and I think something should be done and done immediately.

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